Study: Most of the Cyber Security Industry Is Facing a Serious Skills Shortage

December 8, 2017

10:50 am

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While Hackers used to just be a 1995 movie featuring Angelina Jolie, they’ve actually become a pretty serious global problem in the business world. Granted, personal attacks will never go out of style, as the increased frequency of ransomware attacks has shown, but companies big and small have become the new target for hungry hackers due to their plentiful vulnerabilities across the board. And cyber security professionals are having a difficult time keeping up.

According to a report from Enterprise Strategy Group titled The Life and Times of Cybersecurity Professionals, 70 percent of cyber security professionals believe that their organization is being negatively impacted by the skills shortage in the tech industry. To make matters worse, “63 percent say the cyber security skills shortage has increased the workload on existing staff, 41 percent have had to hire junior personnel in lieu of more experienced staff, and 41 percent claim the cyber security staff spends a disproportional amount of time on incident response and limited time on planning and strategy.”

This is bad. If most companies are opting for inferior or non-existent cyber security measures, hackers will likely have free reign of corporate secrets, personal information, and pretty much whatever they want. Fortunately, there is a solution that, while expensive and lengthy, is the only real way to make a difference: continuous education.

“Much like the state of healthcare and medicine, cybersecurity changes all the time based upon hackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), new technologies, etc,” wrote Jon Oltsik, an ESG senior principal analyst and founder of their cybersecurity service. “Consequently, continuous education is essential.”

While decision makers’ lack of awareness about the dangers of cyber attacks remains an issue, the skills gap presents a much more difficult problem to solve. You can’t merely convince employees to be better at cyber security like you could a founder that refuses to spend on protecting their company. Continuing education is the only way to make sure this issues is resolved. And that is, unfortunately, going to take some time.

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Conor is a writer, comedian and world-renowned sweetheart. As the Assistant Editor and Writer at Tech.Co, he’s written about everything from Kickstarter campaigns and budding startups to tech titans and innovative technologies. His background in stand-up comedy made him the perfect person to host Startup Night at SXSW and the Timmy Awards for Tech in Motion. In his spare time, he thinks about how to properly pronounce the word "colloquially."
Conor is the Assistant Editor and Writer at Tech.Co. You can email him at conor@tech.co.